


Drowned

by Adaney



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, POV Original Character, POV Original Female Character, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 08:15:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20991707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adaney/pseuds/Adaney





	Drowned

God, how good is to be drowned? To laugh with your sister’s fingers around your neck and your head underwater. You’d wanted this. It was vexing the manner in which your charms worked, healed you as you drowned, sparse moments of freedom where your lungs felt as good as they ever had before you were drowning again (it’s a different sensation from the sickening ink that runs slick from your pores at the thought of using your power,  _ borrowed power _ ). You were pulled up after an epoch, after your lungs had run dry and the sight had left your eyes. It felt like it wasn’t long enough as you swayed, your dripping form suspended by the hands of your sisters.

Do they understand your freakish nature? Likely not, but you get results.

* * *

  
  


When you met your sisters you had just gotten done running the longest you’d had in your life. The smell of the streets clung to your like vapors and you ran hot. You were sick for days, feverish from the trip that hadn’t begun and ended as a ride from one destination to another.  _ Stupid. _ There was always something between.

You think you died before Delilah shared her mark with you, before your strength was torn from you a second time in your life, if only for a short while. It reminds you of the time you spend with your arms pinned above your head, the tickling fingers of women you’d bare your soul to tracing the curves of the bones hidden beneath your skin.  _ What pretty things they’d make of them should you perish _ . You shiver.

You like to feel powerless on your own terms.

* * *

You’d never considered yourself particularly beautiful. You never measured up to your peers in the ways that mattered. Book smarts got you nowhere near as far as being just the type for certain men, and so your mother groomed you to take to books only when necessary, to know the right amount of toil to do in the daily affairs of the house; when to divide your duties between domesticity and the staff that was there to do work for you. What use was any of it? Your hair is gone, shaved and kept there by your shaking hands before it can grow to be more than an inch. Your face is adorned only by the ink that bleeds from your tongue and the wells in your eyes, and you like it that way. It feels like something to be frightening.

  
  


There’s a girl, because there’s always a girl. Some aristocrat’s daughter judging by the hook of her nose who finds reason to linger in the dusty entrance of your shop before taking a breath and stepping in. You do no work in this place with the creaking floorboards and splintered counter-top. You conduct business, exchange prearranged quantities of things others don’t understand how to make. 

* * *

For someone to show an interest in  _ you _ is new. 

“How do you do it?” She asks you, and your first thought is that the Order has sent a sister to wrench secrets from your mouth, but there’s no musculature in her frame or a squaring of her shoulders. The complete lack of pretense or expectation leaves you fumbling in front of the muted depths of her eyes. 

“Do what?”

She doesn’t respond and you slowly open yourself back up to the world. She departs from your store after little more than a quarter hour, her eyes drifting around the store and catching on you. You can feel the burn of attention in the back of your mind before she resigns herself to silence, having nothing to say after all. She doesn’t ask you another question until the next time you meet. 

You aren’t in your shop. Your nails are trim and the vines that circle you are hidden for the convenience of operating in regular society. To bump into this girl again is too much to be coincidence, but you say nothing. She opens her mouth as if to say something, face flush, but she must see something in your expression for she stays herself. You continue on.

The third time you meet is proper. She’s sunk into the shadows of one of the taller sisters, pulled about by the force of another person’s gravity before she sees you and escapes from orbit. That she recognizes you is worrisome even if it was an eventuality. Finally, you tell her your name.

“Wanda.” It’s nothing special. It’s not the name you had before you were born again under Delilah’s hand. This sharing of a small piece of yourself is like baptism.


End file.
